Continuing to work toward safer streets

Updated 11:25 am, Wednesday, June 19, 2013

And while it can be a season of fun and relaxation, on the streets of cities like Bridgeport, unfortunately, sometimes the idle hours and the heat combine with the close quarters, the quiet desperation and lingering animosities to create a combustible mix that can lead to gun play.

Any number of organizations, from Gov. Dannel Malloy's office, through local organizations in Bridgeport, have been working hard -- especially since a couple of appalling incidents in 2012 -- to address street violence, particularly gun violence.

The brazen point-blank execution of a 14-year-old boy on Bridgeport's East Side in January 2012 brought a scream from the city, not only from neighborhoods and families that have been scarred by such street violence, but from a disparate sampling of the city at large -- the churches, the Police Department, the OG's -- the grizzled "old gangsters" that populate some neighborhoods -- and others.

It was on the first day of summer a year ago that Malloy announced his "Focused Deterrence" program, which was to bring state criminal justice resources, including state police, corrections, probation, parole and prosecutors -- to collaborate with federal and local law enforcement officials in Bridgeport, Hartford and New Haven, to reduce gun violence.

The Connecticut U.S. Attorney's office has cooperated in ways other than simply prosecuting, but in lending its support to the efforts described here. Something is working: there have been five fewer shooting victims during the first six months of this year than in 2012.

One of the initiatives will make its public appearance in Bridgeport on Thursday at 6:30 p.m. at the Klein, 910 Fairfield Ave.

It is a 30-minute film that has been in the works for more than a year. The actors are kids from the streets of Hartford, Bridgeport and New Haven. They all went through an audition process and, reporters from this newspaper can attest, they brought a charged authenticity to their performances.

The name of the film is "The 5K Motion," a reference to the motion the government files to ask for leniency for a cooperating defendant. This film focuses particularly on the role of young women in gun violence. The film, a companion piece to an earlier film focusing on young men and titled "Mandatory Sentence," is the brainchild of a Boston rap group called 4Peace, which is committed to anti-violence work, and Stop Handgun Violence, based in Newton, Mass. They've been supported by the Reach Foundation, a Farmington-based fundraising organization, and with the encouragement of U.S. Attorney's office in Connecticut.Their goal is to make this film available to any organization that could use it as a tool to get the attention of young men and women, to help keep them from making bad decisions.

The work of all these parties has not been for naught and it has to continue.